[blam]

THE SAMURAI AND THE AINU

[muawiyah]

It's pretty obvious the Samurai and the Ainu have a common heritage which includes certain "racial markers". On the other hand, the Ainu continued to reside in Siberia and North China while the people who became the Samurai lived in what are now the Japanese islands. These are the people known in the Middle Ages as the Emeshi, and they have a culture quite distinct from the Ainu.

Sometime in the late Middle Ages the Emeshi pulled out of the North and moved to Fukuoka to serve as a repository of military force for use by the Emperor and the Daimyo.

That allowed the Ainu to relocate from continental coastal regions into the Northernmost Japanese islands without resistance or difficulty.

Talk about causing some problems in figuring out who came first, the Emeshi or the Samurai.

This has been figured out rather recently, but it definitely addresses the problem in Japanese shaministic folktale lore where the BADGER is the chief animal rather than the BEAR as with the Ainu.

The bear cult, though, extends all the way across the Arctic to Northwest Russia and suggests the Ainu were, in the past, far less isolated from world civilization than they now appear.